“How’s that?” he asked.
Duckworth stared. “That’ll do.”
Tattooed crudely on Gaffney’s back, in black letters two inches tall, was:
IM THE
SICK FUCK
WHO KILLED
SEAN
Duckworth said, “Mr. Gaffney, who’s Sean?”
“Sean?” he said.
“Yeah, Sean.”
Gaffney’s shoulders rose and fell as he shrugged. “I don’t know nobody named Sean. How come?”
THREE
CAL
I knew the name Madeline Plimpton.
She was old-stock Promise Falls. I wasn’t exactly an expert on the town’s history, but I knew the Plimptons were among those who’d established the town back in the 1800s. I knew they’d founded the town’s first newspaper, the Standard, and that Madeline Plimpton had the distinct honor of presiding over its death.
I didn’t know why she wanted to see me. She wouldn’t say in our phone call. Clients don’t usually want to talk about these things over the phone. It’s hard enough doing it in person.
“It’s delicate,” she explained.
It usually was.
I wouldn’t call her place a mansion, but it was pretty upscale for Promise Falls. A Victorian-style home built back in the twenties, probably four or five thousand square feet, set well back from the street, with a circular driveway. It was the kind of place that, at one time, would have had a black jockey lawn ornament out front. If it had ever actually had one, someone’d had the good sense to get rid of it.
I was behind the wheel of my new, aging Honda. I’d traded in my very old Accord for a merely old Accord. This one was equipped with a manual transmission, and shifting through the gears allowed me to imagine myself as someone younger and sportier. My first car, some thirty years ago, had been a Toyota Celica with a four-speed stick shift. Every car I’d had since had been automatic, until now.
I parked out front of the main double doors, my car outclassed by a black Lexus SUV, a white four-door Acura sedan, and a BMW 7 Series. The combined value of those three cars probably exceeded my total income for the last two decades.
I was half expecting a maid or butler to materialize after I pressed the bell, but it was Madeline Plimpton herself who opened the door and invited me in.
I put her at about seventy. She was a thin, nice-looking woman, bordering on regal, dressed in black slacks and a black silk top, a tasteful strand of pearls at her neck. Her well-tended silver hair came down to the base of her neck, and she eyed me through a pair of gold-rimmed glasses.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Weaver,” she said.
“My pleasure. Please call me Cal.”
She did not invite me to call her Madeline.
She led me from the front hall into the dining room, where things had been set up for tea. China cups, milk and sugar cubes in silver servers.
“Can I pour you a cup of tea?” she asked.
“Thank you,” I said.
She poured, then took a seat at the head of the table. I pulled up a chair near the end, to her right.
“I’ve heard good things about you,” she said.
“I suppose, as a former newspaper publisher, you have good sources,” I said, smiling.
I caught her briefly wincing and thought it was my use of the word former. “I do. I know just about everyone in this town. I know you used to work for the police here. That you made a mistake, moved away for a few years to Griffon, where you set yourself up as a private investigator, and then came back.” She paused. “After a personal tragedy.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’ve been back here a couple of years.”
“Yes.” I dropped a sugar cube into my tea. “So I guess I passed the background check. What seems to be the problem?”
Ms. Plimpton drew a long breath, then raised her cup to her lips and blew on it. The tea was hot.
“It’s about my grand-nephew,” she said.
“Okay.”
“My niece’s son. It’s been quite a year for them.”
I waited.
“My niece and her son live in Albany. But life for them there has become untenable.”
I was pretty sure I knew what that word meant.
“And why would that be?” I asked.
Another pause. “Jeremy—that’s my grand-nephew—had some issues with the courts this year that attracted an unfortunate degree of attention. It’s made life very difficult for him there. Some people who don’t seem to have much appreciation of the justice system have been harassing Jeremy and my niece, Gloria. Late-night phone calls, eggs thrown at the house. Someone even left a death threat in the mailbox. It was written in crayon on a piece of paper that had been smeared with excrement, if you can imagine such a thing.”
“What do you mean by ‘some issues,’ Ms. Plimpton?”
“A traffic mishap. It got blown out of proportion. I mean, I’m not suggesting it wasn’t a tragedy, but the fallout has just been over the top.”
“Ms. Plimpton, maybe you should start at the beginning.”
Her head made a tiny side-to-side motion. “I don’t see that that’s necessary. I’m interested in engaging your services, and it’s not important for you to know all the details. Although I can tell you that Gloria is almost more a daughter to me than a niece. She came to live with me when she was a teenager, so our relationship is . . .”
I was waiting for her to say “closer.”
“Complicated,” Ms. Plimpton said at last.
“I don’t know what service it is you expect me to perform,” I said.
“I want you to protect Jeremy.”
“What do you mean, protect? You mean you want me to be his bodyguard?”
“Yes, I suppose that would be part of it. I’d want you to assess his security situation and, as you say, perform bodyguard duties.”
“I’m not a bodyguard. Maybe what you need is a bouncer.”
Madeline Plimpton sighed. “Well, perhaps you don’t think of yourself that way, technically. But you are a former policeman. You’ve dealt with criminal elements. I would think that being a bodyguard really wouldn’t be straying all that much from what you actually do. And I’m perfectly prepared to pay you round-the-clock for as long as your services might be required. One of the reasons I chose you was because I understand you have—I don’t mean to be insensitive here, Mr. Weaver—but I understand you have no family. It wouldn’t be disruptive in ways that it might be to someone else.”
I wasn’t sure I liked Madeline Plimpton. But then again, in my line of work, if you only worked for people you wanted to be friends with, you wouldn’t eat.
“How old is Jeremy?” I asked.
“Eighteen,” she said.
“And what’s his last name?”
She bit her lip briefly. “Pilford,” she said, almost in a whisper.
I blinked. “Jeremy Pilford? Your grand-nephew is Jeremy Pilford?”
She nodded. “I take it that you are familiar with the name.”
The entire country was familiar with the name.
“The Big Baby,” I said.
Madeline Plimpton winced more noticeably this time. She looked as though I’d poured my hot tea over her veined hand.
“I wish you hadn’t said that. Those words were never used in his defense. That was something the prosecution came up with and the press ran with, and it was insulting. It was demeaning. Not just to Jeremy, but to Gloria, too. It reflected very badly on her.”
“But it came out of the defense strategy, didn’t it, Ms. Plimpton? It’s basically what Jeremy’s lawyer was saying. That was the argument. That Jeremy had been so pampered, so excused from ever having to do things for himself, from ever having to accept responsibility for any of his actions his entire life, that he couldn’t imagine that he was doing anything wrong when he—”
“I know what he did.”
“When he went out partying, got behind the wheel total
ly under the influence, and killed someone. With all respect, Ms. Plimpton, that’s not what I would characterize as a traffic mishap.”
“Maybe you’re not the right person for this job.”
“Maybe I’m not,” I said, setting down my cup and pushing back my chair. “Thank you for the tea.”
She reached out a hand. “Wait.”
I waited.
“Please,” she said.
I pulled my chair back in, rested my hands on the top of the dining room table.
“I suppose it’s reasonable to expect that your reaction is unlikely to be any different from that of anyone else I might approach. Jeremy has not been good at winning people over. But it was the judge’s decision not to send him to jail. It was the judge who decided to put the boy on probation. It was the judge who was persuaded by Mr. Finch that—”
“Mr. Finch?”
“Jeremy’s lawyer, whom you just referenced. Grant Finch. It was Mr. Finch who came up with the defense strategy, and to be honest, no one had high hopes that the judge would find it convincing. But we were ecstatic when he did. Sending Jeremy to jail would have been a terrible thing for the boy. After all, he is still a boy. He’d never have survived prison. And as horrible as the backlash to the sentence has been, it’s still better than Jeremy being behind bars.”
“Except now he’s living in fear,” I said.
Madeline Plimpton offered a small nod of acknowledgment. “That’s true, but these things pass. Jeremy could have gone to jail for several years. Social consternation over his sentencing will last a few months at most, I should think. The world is always waiting for the new thing to be outraged by. A hunter who kills a prize lion in Africa. A woman who tweets a joke about AIDS. A dimwitted politician who thinks a woman’s body knows how to shut down pregnancy following rape. That other judge, who gave the light sentence to the boy who raped that unconscious girl. We are so thrilled to be angered about something that we want a new target for our rage every week. Jeremy will be forgotten about, eventually, and he will be able to return to a normal life. But in the meantime, he needs to be safe.”
I wondered about when the family of the person Jeremy had killed would get back to a normal life, but decided not to pose the question out loud.
“So yes, to your earlier comment, he was branded the Big Baby. A teenager who was coddled as though he were an infant. The prosecuting attorney mentioned it once in passing, and the media loved it. CNN turned Jeremy into a flashy logo. The Big Baby Case, with lots of jazzy graphics.”
“As someone who once ran a newspaper, you must have some understanding of how those things happen.”
“Indeed,” she said. “But just because I owned a media outlet does not mean I approve of everything the media does.”
“I really don’t know that I can help you, Ms. Plimpton,” I said. “But I could probably recommend some agencies to you. Ones that don’t really do much in the way of investigations, as I do. They’re more like tough guys for hire.”
“I don’t want Jeremy surrounded by a bunch of thugs.”
I shrugged.
“Would you at least meet with them?” she asked. “With Jeremy and my niece? At least meet them and then make a decision about whether you want the job? I’m sure once you spoke with them, you’d realize they aren’t the caricatures they’ve been made out to be. They’re real people, Mr. Weaver. And they’re frightened.”
I got out my notepad and pen from the inside pocket of my sport jacket. I uncapped the pen.
“Why don’t you give me their address in Albany?” I said.
“Oh, there’s no need for that,” Ms. Plimpton said. “They’re here. They’ve been here for a few days now. They’re out back, on the porch, waiting to talk to you.”
FOUR
BARRY Duckworth wanted Brian Gaffney to get checked out at the hospital, so he offered to drive him to Promise Falls General. That would also give the detective an opportunity to ask the man more questions about what might have happened to him. Any thoughts Duckworth had that Gaffney’s two-day blackout was alcohol-induced vanished when he had a look at the words inked into his back.
IM THE SICK FUCK WHO KILLED SEAN did not sound like the kind of tattoo any remotely rational person—or even a blind-drunk person—would choose to have permanently etched into his skin.
If Gaffney had any notion of what was on his back, he gave no indication. So Duckworth took a photo while he still had his shirt pulled up to his neck, and showed it to him.
“Jesus,” he said. “That . . . that doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“I think,” Duckworth said gently, “this rules out your theory of what happened to you.”
Gaffney had the look of a four-year-old trying to grasp a Stephen Hawking lecture. “I don’t . . . That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing the aliens would do.”
“Yeah,” Duckworth said. “We’re looking for someone more earthbound here.”
Gaffney, still stunned by the photo, nodded slowly. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“I must seem crazy. I’m not crazy, you know.”
“Sure,” Duckworth said.
“I mean, I’m a little off. That’s what my dad says. But not crazy. You know what I mean?”
“Sure.”
“I just couldn’t think of any other explanation. Maybe I’ve been reading too many books about UFOs.” He took another look at the photo on the detective’s phone. “Are you sure that’s a real tattoo? It’s not just marker or something that’ll come off?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s on there permanent?”
“I’m no expert on tattoos,” Duckworth said. “Maybe there’s something you can do.” But he had his doubts. “Any idea who’d do that to you?”
Gaffney looked away from the image, allowing Duckworth to put the phone into his pocket. Tears welled up in his eyes. He bit his lip. “No. I mean, the alien thing would actually have made more sense. That they’d grab some random guy and do tests on him. But this, this is totally crazy.”
“Come on,” Duckworth said gently. “Let’s get you checked out.”
On the way out to Duckworth’s unmarked cruiser, the detective asked, “You got family, Brian? Parents? Brothers, sisters? A girlfriend?”
He spoke slowly and softly. “My folks live over on Montcalm. I got my own place about six months ago. They thought—my dad thought—it was time for me to try living on my own, you know? So I found a room in this two-story building downtown. I got one sister. Monica. She’s nineteen. She’d like to move out but she can’t afford to yet.”
“How long have you been in Promise Falls?”
“Like, fifteen years. Ever since my parents moved here from Connecticut.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Kinda. There’s this one girl. She came in for a car wash and we kind of hit it off.”
“What’s her name?”
“Jesse. Like, Jessica Frommer.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
Brian pondered the question. “Maybe a week? We’ve been out a few times, mostly out of town or my place. I think, actually, I was supposed to call her yesterday.” He looked overwhelmed. “Shit, she’ll be wondering what happened to me.”
“You can’t think of anyone—a friend, a friend of a friend, someone in your extended family—named Sean? A man or a woman?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Can I see the picture again?”
Duckworth took out his phone and brought up the photo. Gaffney stared at it and said, “I keep thinking it can’t really be there. That this isn’t really happening. That this isn’t a picture of my back. Who could Sean be?” He returned the phone. “I’ve been turned into some kind of freak.”
On the way to the hospital, Duckworth did a spin through a McDonald’s drive-through, buying Gaffney a coffee and a biscuit stuffed with egg and sausage. The man downed it nearly as quickly as he’d consumed the ripe banana.
The Pr
omise Falls General ER wasn’t crowded. Gaffney was seen within ten minutes. Duckworth quickly briefed the doctor—a young Indian-looking man named Dr. Charles—and said he wanted to speak with him after the examination. Then the detective stepped outside where he could get a decent signal on his cell phone, and opened up a browser.
He entered the words “Sean” and “homicide” and waited. Over a million results, but the first few screens didn’t turn up anything that looked relevant. Some of the hits were crime books or newspaper articles about homicides, written by someone with the first name Sean. He narrowed the search by adding the words “Promise Falls”, but that produced nothing.
He went back into the ER and took a seat. A few minutes later, Brian Gaffney reappeared with Dr. Charles.
“May I discuss your particulars with the police officer?” the doctor asked.
Gaffney nodded wearily.
“Mr. Gaffney’s general heath seems to be okay,” Dr. Charles said. “He’s still a bit groggy from whatever was used to render him unconscious.”
“Any idea what that might have been?”
The doctor shook his head. “But I’d like to keep him here for observation and blood tests. Do you have any idea who tattooed him? If you did, we could find out about their safety precautions, if they used proper sterilization techniques.”
“We don’t know,” the detective said.
Dr. Charles made a clicking noise with his tongue. “Well, if the equipment used was contaminated with infected blood, Mr. Gaffney could be at risk of hepatitis B, hepatitis C or tetanus.”
“Ah, man,” Gaffney said.
“I’m around if you have any more questions,” the doctor said, excusing himself.
Duckworth put a comforting hand on Brian’s arm. “I want to take your picture,” he said.
“Huh?”
“I’m going to go to Knight’s, see if anyone remembers seeing you.”
Gaffney nodded resignedly. Duckworth took a quick head shot with his phone, glanced at it to make sure it was acceptable. “You want me to get in touch with your parents?”
Gaffney thought about that. “I guess,” he said finally.